• Some Thoughts on the 22 Percent iSeries Sales Decline in Q1

  April 24, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I reported elsewhere in this issue, IBM announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2006 last week, and in those results, Big Blue said that the System i, formerly iSeries, server business was off 22 percent. This, obviously, is not great news, but IBM, like other server vendors, blamed this decline, as well as the 18 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2005, on product transitions. In the fourth quarter, IBM explained, customers were expecting revamped machines in the first quarter of 2006, and at the end of January they came out. The expectation slowed sales

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• Yankee Group Says SMBs Want Better Integration

  April 24, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The small and medium business (SMB) sector of the IT economy is neglected in many ways, and one of them is in detailed research about exactly what SMBs are up to and what kinds of IT products they are looking for. Because no one really likes a low-margin, high-volume business, the big IT consultancies and analyst organizations of the world tend to focus on what large organizations want, need, or should do, and when they talk about the SMB market, they are often really talking about medium businesses, which are quite large compared to real SMBs. But, the SMB market

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• ISVs React (Or Not) to PHP on the System i

  April 24, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  The news that PHP will be available on the System i–and for free!–seems to have captured the imagination and interest of many. After all, it’s a Java alternative, and we all know how unenthusiastic many iSeries users have been about going down the Java road. The potential is there, many say, for PHP to have a big–even huge–impact on the System i5 line. But there are some issues that need to be dealt with first. For one thing, there are lots and lots of young and enthusiastic PHP programmers who are devoted to this easy-to-learn and easy-to-use Web scripting language.

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• Common User Group Starts Midrange Career Center

  April 24, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The COMMON user group Web site has launched an online job service for companies looking to hire iSeries experts and for iSeries experts looking for new jobs. The Common Career Center is located at http://careercenter.common.org, and is one of a number of such job posting areas that are hosted by interested parties in the OS/400 community. The job posting areas are open to the 22,000 members of the COMMON user group as well as to any company or individual who is not a member. The employer side of the site allows employers to post jobs online, search for candidates

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• Oracle Indefinitely Extends the Life of JDE World, EnterpriseOne

  April 24, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The users of the World and EnterpriseOne ERP software suites from the former J.D. Edwards will probably breathe a sigh of relief this week, and so will the top brass at IBM‘s System i division. The reason why is that Charles Phillips, Oracle‘s president, and Mark Shearer, general manager of the System i business, will announce that Oracle will now support and enhance the JDE World and EnterpriseOne suites indefinitely–no strings, no gimmicks, no tricks. Oracle and IBM will be making the announcement at the Collaborate 06 user group meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Collaborate is a joint event

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• Lawson Stockholders Approve Intentia Acquisition

  April 24, 2006 Dan Burger

  Lawson Software and Intentia International, two ERP software vendors with OS/400-based products and an ongoing effort to merge companies, cleared a big hurdle in the merger process when last week Lawson stockholders voted in favor of the deal. Plans that detailed Lawson’s $480 million stock transition for the acquisition of Intentia were first revealed in June 2005. It appears as though the two companies will now close the transaction by the end of April. Lawson reported that 74.5 percent of shareholders voted in favor of the agreement. The vote clears the way for the issuance of about 81 million

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• Cost Controls Boost IBM Earnings on Flat Q1 Revenues

  April 24, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If this were a decade ago, and IT industry juggernaut IBM told Wall Street that its mainframe business was off 6 percent, its proprietary midrange server business was off 22 percent, its Unix server business was off 9 percent, its services business was off 1 percent, and its software business was only up 3 percent, Big Blue would have had its corporate head handed to it. But, this is 2006, and what matters more than revenue growth for the largest IT company in the world is improving profits, which IBM did manage to get in the first quarter of 2006.

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• Plasmon Gives Free UDO Media in Upgrade Deal

  April 24, 2006 Dan Burger

  Mandatory compliance regulations have a way of sinking their teeth into the soft fleshy areas of an IT budget. Seldom is this a painless experience. In terms of record keeping, companies are faced with decisions on which records they must keep, how they are to be stored (usually on unalterable media), and how long companies must store them (up to 30 years in some cases). All of this costs money. Lots of it. However, for those companies that are using optical storage (MO, DVD and 12-inch optical discs), Plasmon has introduced an ultra density optical (UDO) migration option that brings

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• As I See It: Fearless Leaders

  April 24, 2006 Victor Rozek

  Your name is Henry McKinnell and for the past six years you have been struggling on the job. By exacting corporate standards, where results are the measure of intentions, there is not much in your performance that demonstrates anything but a steadfast intention to get by on mediocrity. Secretly, you’re tired of all the pressure and weary of all the complaints. It would be nice just to walk away, to leave the mess for someone else to sort out, but retirement is so uncertain these days. You close your office door, open your desk, pull out your retirement folder and

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• Digital TV Meets Portal Technology

  April 24, 2006 Dan Burger

  Voice Over IP got a lot of play at the COMMON conference last month in Minneapolis, but broadband networks are also factoring into the future of digital TV services, so all you future-thinkers should keep an eye on developments such as IP-TV. In the current issue of the IBM WebSphere Technical Journal, you’ll find out how portal technology is bringing IP-TV to the desktop. Somewhere somebody is saying “Great! Just what the workplace needs is more distractions.” Well, not so fast. Let’s look at the potential for good in this. Written by two IBM digital media pros, “Creating a

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